Bangkok Old Hand

by Collin Piprell

Everything is amplified to coffee-shop decibel levels. I can't even go to the police — they are the police.

  • The seamstress with sewing machine in the lane, pedalling and humming and sewing all day. THE MUSIC- TAPE VENDOR, DOWN THE LANE AND OUT ON THE STREET, SAMPLE BLARING LOUD ENOUGH TO DROWN OUT THE SOUNDS OF TRAFFIC.

  And he sets up right beside the only public telephone box for hundreds of metres around.

  Hey, calm down, my girlfriend tells me. It's not so bad. Relax — it's the Thai Way.

  Right, I answer: how would you feel if someone — without knocking or any other ceremony — came clumping into your house, maybe banging on a pot at the same time, and marched around in large boots for an hour or two? An unacceptable invasion of your personal space? Then how is that different from our neighbour's big-band practice? It's just as disruptive to life here in my study. And the 50-megaton stereo sets, are they not equally an invasion of one's privacy?

  But think of ages past, she says. You might have been sitting there having your tea and gazing contentedly at the needle-point motto over the mantel — "A Man's Home Is His Castle" — when a noisy Mongol horde or the Black Plague or something came calling. That's a pretty fair invasion of your privacy, isn't it? It's nothing new. You just have to put up with it.

  Resign yourself to it, right? Well, maybe: but I haven't even given you the bad news, yet. Technology has already found new and peculiarly aggravating ways to intrude upon us (the hydrogen bomb and the stereo amplifier, for example). Shortly, however, this invasion is going to assume truly colossal dimensions.

  You've probably read about it in the newspaper. In 1989, France is going to orbit a "Light Ring" — a circular rubber hose 4.5 miles in diameter with reflective Mylar spheres all along its circumference—to mark the centennial of the Eiffel Tower. This graffito, soon to be scrawled 500 miles high on its celestial billboard, bodes ill for us all. Larger than the moon, seen from the surface of the Earth, it'll dominate the night sky throughout the world. Poets, lovers, musers on the Infinite Mysteries, only recently reconciled to footprints on the moon, now face vandalism on a really awesome scale.

  Granted, this particular gimmick is supposed to disintegrate after three years. That's great. Fine. The question is, however, what's next?

  The year is 1997, let's say. You've gone to Phukradeung National Park to get away from Bangkok, and its 11,000,000 people and fruit hawkers with the new directional-beam super-amplified speakers that target individual people in their beds.

  Ah, yes; but now you're practically in the wilderness, all primed for the wonders of nature. Evening is approaching, and you weight your blanket down with a loaf of bread, a bottle of wine, and Her. High on this remote grassy plateau, with the lonesome pine trees soughing in the breeze, you eagerly await the appearance of the stars, which you haven't seen since 1993, the pollution and the lights of the megalopolis having utterly obscured them for years now.

  But what's this? As the last light of day fades, what must be new constellations begin to appear. Is that a hammer and sickle burning red in the northeast? It's dark now, and you see more: Pepsi-Cola and Coca-Cola vie for command of the western hemisphere of the heavens. You had read about this, but it really hadn't sunk in. Coca-Cola's celestial sign starts to blink rhythmically in time to... what? Something is covering the soughing of the wind in the trees. Something... Ah — there it is: the new "Things Go Better With Coke" jingle. It's true, what the papers said; recent technological breakthroughs now permit purveyors of soft drinks and ideologies alike to bounce amplified sound waves off the ionosphere. They can hawk their goods to whole hemispheres at a time.

  And look up there! Your girlfriend's pointing at the breathtaking four-colour Nissan ad for its 1998 models. She turns to you. McDonald's Golden Arches shining in her eyes, and she says, 'You really ought to trade in that old wreck you're driving."

  I guess what I'm trying to say is that maybe it's time to resist. Why don't more people complain about amplified fruit vendors? Today it was my morning reverie; tomorrow it'll be good-bye starry heavens and hello "TWINKLE, TWINKLE LITTLE TWINKIE (WE NOW COME IN FOUR FABULOUS FLAVOURS!)".

  15 MY CAREER AS A MODEL

  "My Career As a Model", which appeared in the Bangkok Post in 1986, was Ham Fiske's first published story.

  The modelling agency called yesterday to ask if I could be at the Montien Hotel at noon. It would be worth 2500 baht a day. Dress like a businessman. You don't have a suit or a jacket? No problem. Wear a tie; we'll fix you up. Please be on time.

  I have to take a taxi but I arrive at 12:00 on the button. I have never been a model before, but I reckon a good model is punctual. I find the advertising director and camera crew busy in the garden restaurant downstairs, but they are not ready for me yet. A gofer is assigned to take me to lunch. How long is it all going to take? He thinks I should be finished around 3:00. No problem.

  After a leisurely lunch spent wishing that either the gofer had more English or I had more Thai, I am taken upstairs to the make-up room. I am lightly dusted with powder, my hair is arranged and fixed with spray, and I am given a cream-coloured jacket that is too big and makes me look like Orson Welles. That's okay, mind you. Later I meet one of my colleagues for the day, and he looks like Pierrot le Fou. At least he does when he stands up. They have told him that does not matter; they will not have to take pictures of his legs, and, sitting down, he looks like a businessman. Then why, he asks, did you make me take off the trousers I came in and put on these ridiculous pantaloons instead? But now everyone is busy, and no one answers him. I reckon I look like Robert Redford from the waist down, in my smartly tailored trousers; but it is definitely Orson Welles up there were the cameras are. They will not need shots of my legs. A pity.

  Only slightly redesigned by the make-up people, I follow my erstwhile lunch companion up to the top floor of the hotel, to an "Executive Lounge". There I find a table laden with elaborately carved fruits, flowers, a magnificent cheese board, and an interesting objet sculpted from slices of rolled ham and beef and other things. There are also two tables set as for breakfast. No one else is here yet. We are running behind schedule. When will I be finished? Oh, probably about 5:00. Would I like something to drink? Or to eat? I have noticed there is a fully stocked bar in the room. I have a snifter of cognac.

  I am alone in the room but for a liveried waiter. He is behind the bar. I wonder how they would go for a few shots of a businessman passed out, face down in the scrambled eggs.

  I am enjoying a reflective moment on a sofa by the window, gazing out over central Bangkok, when a rather attractive lady joins me, dressed as for business and still trailing powder from the make-up room. She also has cognac, and we while away the time quite pleasantly, chatting and watching the camera crew and equipment assemble. I am impressed at how much is involved in taking a few still photographs. I especially like the guy who keeps darting about the place taking readings with a light meter and scribbling things in a little book. Now he runs his instrument over the lady's forehead, now over her décolletage. He shakes his head fretfully. It is pretty tricky stuff, whatever it is they are all doing. I can see that.

  Someone, for some reason, feels that we are ready. It is now 3:30. Action! The lady I have been talking to gets to stay on the sofa by herself, posed with documents in hand.

  Pierrot le Fou has arrived, trying to walk in such a way as to hide his trousers, no mean trick, even for the experienced part-time model he turns out to be. He and I sit down together at one of the tables. We are to be two businessmen, just up after a good night's sleep in a superb hotel, sitting contentedly at breakfast — fried eggs with bacon for him and scrambled eggs with ham for me, both dishes having obviously been there for some hours already. Another gentleman — a Thai who has been recruited, we are told, because he looks Japanese — sits at the table behind us, breakfast not yet served, reading an English edition of Time magazine. Only he cannot read English.

  So that is the scene, and that is what we
all do for two and a half hours. Except for Pierrot and I, who are required to contrive big smiles for a waitress who poses over my friend's coffee cup. For some shots, we have to hold our smiles for six seconds. Don't blink, now. Eventually I get so hungry the eggs actually look good. The Thai gentleman doesn't read Time till I can hear him whimpering quietly to himself. The lady on the sofa has committed to memory the documents which she must hold in a self- important manner. She is now going over the list of hotels, embassies, and car rental agencies again in her mind, translating everything into Pig Latin.

  Pierrot has told me about every acting and modelling job he has ever had in Thailand. There have been quite a number.

  It is so late in the day now that the technicians have to change all the light bulbs in the room in an effort to convince the camera it is still morning.

  There is only one camera, but there is a crew of 12 or 15 people, aside from the models. Many of them apparently have nothing to do but loll about and languish. Others specialise in running off on mysterious errands. The crew includes a trans-sexual sidekick of the make-up boys, who themselves look as though they are on a waiting list for similar operations. The trans-sexual has a bass voice and is twice as big as most of her fellow Thais.

  Each of us models has a touch-up with the powder puff, and some of the hair on the front of my head is bent back a bit. My hair feels as though it has been cast in plastic. I wonder that they have not thought of using that spray to fix our smiles, as well; the muscles that arrange my face in a smile are going into spasm.

  Finally we are finished. The lady on the sofa puts her documents down, aims a glassy stare at the bar, and says, "Randybay?" The Thai gentleman behind me being a Japanese who reads English puts his head down on the table and groans. I tell Pierrot that it has been pleasant talking to him, but now I have got to run to meet some friends. The advertising director says you, the big one, please come over here.

  It is 6:00 and I am not finished. When? Oh, maybe around 8:30, okay?

  One end of the Executive Lounge is being transformed. I am parked at a desk complete with computer, desk diary, and shelves full of reference books and antique Thai curios. Here is the compleat businessman combining business with pleasure. For the next two hours I am required to gaze into the eyes of the astonishingly beautiful Thai-Pakistani "secretary" the hotel has put at my disposal. And smile radiantly. Meanwhile she is doing the same right back at me. After a couple of hours of this kind of thing, of course, I am hopelessly in love.

  Now it is 8:30, and the whole crew has retired to dinner at a restaurant downstairs. I am sitting across from my one true love, who is 18 years old and speaks no English. I make brilliant dinner conversation in Thai. It is remarkable what one can do with a vocabulary of 25 words.

  Dinner finished, my dessert shared with the lovely Lek (for "Lek" is her name), we all go upstairs to another room where there is a table draped with linen and set with crystal and china. Most of us go up to this room, that is — my Lek has disappeared along the way.

  I am sitting at the head of a table of nine. A chairman- of-the-board type. My loved one returns. She has a new hairstyle and is wearing evening clothes. I would not have believed it possible: she is even more beautiful than before. She is seated beside me. Joy. Just a minute! Woe. She is re-seated down the table because her gray silk outfit better complements the dark suits at the end. (I am still in cream and tan.) Aesthetically a sound judgment, I am bound to admit. But inhumane. I fancy she casts the occasional languishing glance my way.

  Lights! Camera! Unaccountable delays. Accountable delays — for example, the crystal goblets are mismatched; some part of the entourage runs off to find a substitute setting.

  We, the dinner guests, get tired of conversation and of trying to decide whether these exotic hors d'oeuvres are plastic or cleverly mummified bits of real food. We get up and tour the room to discover that one of the original oils, an abstract, has been hung upside down, unless the artist habitually signs his name upside down in the upper left- hand corner. We re-hang it only to decide that we should have left well enough alone. We are asked to resume our places at the table.

  Two of the dinner guests are sleeping. More than half the entourage have been sprawled asleep here and there on the floor since shortly after we arrived. By 12:30 we look like an assembly of corpses — the grey shells of people who have died in various attitudes of despair and have been propped up at a macabre banquet that will never be served. I know my vital functions are at a low ebb when I can look at the lovely Lek without suffering palpitations.

  A fuse blows; we are plunged into darkness. Lights come on. Members of the entourage run out on various missions. At 12:50, despite the fact that everything seems to my uneducated eye the same as it has been all night, we are asked to look animated. To smile. To chat. To exude bonhomie and goodwill towards life in general and this hotel in particular. The undead. I have a charley horse in a smiling muscle. My attempts both to smile and to open my eyes brightly at the same time have resulted, I fear, in my looking utterly psychotic.

  One-thirty in the morning. It is over. It is really finished. The entourage is all awake and milling about. I take off my Orson Welles jacket. Pierrot heads down to the make-up room to look for his trousers. I have been a model. Another chapter in a rich saga. Never again.

  The horror. They want me to come back tomorrow. I am to wear black shoes and navy-blue trousers. Lek? You mean the girl? Yes, she'll be here tomorrow. How long will it take? Oh, only about three or four hours; we'll be finished by four in the afternoon. Don't worry about a jacket — we'll look after that. Yes, she'll be here.

  16 LETTING IT ALL HANG OUT

  People-watching on a Bangkok bus is one way to while away a traffic jam. It can also be a window on passing fads and other human foibles (among these the question of how Ham had come to leave his trousers in Chiang Mai).

  The other day I spent a couple of years sitting on a bus in a traffic jam.

  I was too well rested to catnap, and I was trying to swear off falling in love with lovely young things sitting across the aisle and five seats forward — these unrequited affairs of the mind had taken too great an emotional toll lately. So I thought I'd read some clothing labels for a change.

  To my surprise and disappointment, I discovered that a whole No. 15 bus full of stylish folk of various sexes and ages did not afford the literary content of the back of a small box of cornflakes.

  "What ho?" I thought. "Another change of fashions? Where have all the labels gone?"

  It had caught me unawares — just as, on the other hand, I had been one of the last to realise that clothing labels had crept out of hiding into the public eye in the first place.

  I first noticed the latter phenomenon one day in Chiang Rai. I had lost my trousers in Chiang Mai, and was rather concerned to find a new pair, being now in a hurry to leave Chiang Rai.

  Back then, outsized farangs were not part of every Chiang Rai shopkeeper's inventory planning. In fact, a search suggested that there was precisely one pair of trousers in the whole town that would fit me off the rack. Though they weren't what would've been my first choice out of any two pairs of trousers in the world, they did fit, and I went into my Wily Haggler mode, singlehandedly taking on a whole team of fresh-faced young salesgirls. We'd got down to what I suppose was a fair price, though I hated to pay anything at all for these specimens. Then I saw what I thought was a last ploy.

  "Aha!" I said. "Someone has scribbled something on the front pocket. See there? They've written their name or something on it. These pants've been ruined; they're practically worthless. I'll give you 150 baht."

  "Oh, no! Dee mahk! Number one!" the opposition side chorused. "Good. Is very good!"

  Their argument was that the value of the item was all the greater because some nitwitted manufacturer had hung his name out there for the whole world to see. This was a new concept for me, but I felt like a bit of an ass in the bath towel, and time was getting short. I paid
their price.

  Where did it all start? When did we consumers begin paying clothing manufacturers for the privilege of advertising their products? With blue jeans, I think. Ever since I can remember, blue jeans of all makes have advertised themselves on the hip pockets. That had become an accepted part of the culture many decades ago. To have anything else in the way of labels adorning one's person, though, was not conventional.

  When I was a boy, I wasn't much into sartorial splendour. In the mad dash to get the school bus, odd socks were not unusual. Neither was an inside-out pullover shirt or sweater, labels all aflutter. This would be sure to cause great hilarity among my associates — sort of the equivalent of appearing absentmindedly in public without one's trousers. Not at all conventional. Not done.

  Times change, however. I'm not sure exactly when it began, but the big fashion houses (Cardin, Dior, Lanvin, etc.) began to market lines of clothing for the unwashed masses. The trouble with this was, the manufacturers were afraid, the buyer's fellow peasants wouldn't be able to recognise quality all on its own. What they could be led to recognise was the label, however, and before long there you had it: Don't step on my Gucci suede shoes.

  Suddenly I hadn't put my shirt on inside-out, after all. Everything was okay. It was now de rigueur to have labels hanging out on all sides. It was the smart thing to do. If possible, you should try to look like a Formula One racing car, only instead of "Bardahl" and "Champion Spark Plugs" you were sporting "Countess Mara" (your tie), "Gucci" (your shoes), "Pierre Cardin" (your belt), "Levi" (your shirt), "Calvin Klein" (your trousers), etc. On my school bus, I could have sent my mates into terminal paroxysms of mirth.

  In any case, before we all knew it, labels had swept the world: people were sold the idea that it was really a matter of self-advertisement. You were cool because your labels identified you with expensive and stylish togs (even if they weren't really).